Miss Primrose Part 19

"The curriculum," replied Let.i.tia, without a smile. "Do you know what I asked him?" She leaned her chin upon her hands and gazed at Dove's laughing face across the table. "Do you know what I asked that man?"

"No."

"I asked him if Samuel Luther Shears was provided for in the curriculum."

"You didn't say _Luther_, Let.i.tia!"

"I did--I said Luther."

"Darling! And what did he say to that?"

Let.i.tia smiled.

"What could he say, my love?"

VI

TRUANTS IN ARCADY

The excitement vanished as it had come, in our tranquil air. A few keen April nights had been sufficient for the sentinels in the lilac-bushes, who wearied of yawning at St. Peter's silent and gloomy walls. Their ardor and the matrons' midnight coffee cooling together, they were withdrawn, and the Guards themselves, though they had no formal mustering-out, forgot their fears and countersigns and met no more.

Friendships were renewed. Neighbors nodded again across their fences.

Protestant housewives dropped Catholic-vended sugar into their tea, and while there were men like Shears, who still in dreams saw candles burning, St. Peter's a.r.s.enal became a quiet parish church again.

Untouched by the whirlwind's pa.s.sing, Let.i.tia's window-garden went on blooming red, her pictures still hung defiantly on the walls, and cla.s.sic fiction tempted our youth to her corner shelf. Colonel Shears, however, in that single visit to the school-room, had found new texts for his loquacity, and, our courts failing as usual to furnish him with sufficient cases to engross his mind, he devoted himself with new ardor to our public welfare, and recalled eloquently, to those who had time to listen, the little, old, red school-house of their youth, the simpler methods of the old school-masters, who had no fads or foibles beyond the birch, and who achieved, he said--witness his hearers, to say nothing of his humble self--results to which the world might point with satisfaction if not with pride. Had the modern schools produced an Abraham Lincoln, he wished to know?

"Not by a jugful," was his own reply. "You may talk about your kindergartens, and your special courses, and your Froebel, and your Delsarte, and you may hang up your Eyetalian pictures on the wall, and stick up geraniums in your windows--but where is your Abraham? That's what I ask, gentlemen. I tell you, the schools they had when you and I were boys--gentlemen, they were ragged--they were ragged, as we were--but they turned out men! And you mark my words: there ain't any old maid in Gra.s.sy Ford, with all her ancient cla.s.sics, and her new methods, and her gimcracks and flower-pots, that'll ever--produce--an Honest--Abe!"

I am told that the crowd agreed with him so heartily and with such congratulatory delight that he was emboldened to announce himself then and there as a candidate for the school-board. Though he failed of election, there was always a party in Gra.s.sy Ford opposed to new-fangled methods in the schools. Let.i.tia herself was quite aware that even among her fellow-teachers there were those who smiled at her geraniums, and there had been some criticism of her manner of conducting cla.s.ses. Shears was fond of relating how a visitor to her room had found a cla.s.s in fractions discussing robins' eggs! Let.i.tia explained the matter simply enough, but the fact remained for the Colonel to enlarge upon.

"A lesson," he said, "in Robinson's _Complete Arithmetic_, page twenty-seven, may end in somebody's apple-tree, or the top of Sun Dial, or Popocatapetl, or Peru! Gentlemen, I maintain that such dilly-dallying is a subversion of the--"

"Subversion!" growled old man b.u.t.ters, who still came out on sunny days with the aid of his cane. "I calculate you mean it's not right."

"That," said the orator, suavely, "is the meaning I intended to convey, Mr. b.u.t.ters."

"Well, then, you're wrong," grumbled the old man. "Why, that there girl"--he called her so till the day he died, this side of ninety--"that there girl's a trump, Sam Shears, I tell ye. She teaches Robinson and G.o.d A'mighty, too!"

Let.i.tia was often now in the public eye; her teaching was made a campaign issue, though all her nature shrank from such contests. It was easy to attack her manner of instruction, and sometimes difficult to defend it--it had been so subtle in its plan, and so unusual in its execution, and, moreover, time alone could disclose what fruits would ripen from its flowery care. Old Mr. b.u.t.ters had put roughly what Dr.

Primrose himself had taught:

"Dearly beloved, in the fountains of learning, no less than in the water-brooks, His lilies blow."

"Wouldst thou love G.o.d?" he asked, in the last sermon that he ever wrote. "First, love His handiwork."

It was his daughter's motto. It hung on the walls of her simple chamber, with others from her "other poets," as she used to call them--little rubrics printed for her in red and gold at the "Pide Bull." That handiwork of G.o.d which she still called Gra.s.sy Fordshire was so full of marvels to this poet's daughter, there were so many flowers in it, the birds there sang so blithely, its waters ran with such tremulous messages echoed by woods and whispered by meadow-gra.s.ses, its skies, melting into glowing promises in the west, shone thereafter with such jewelled truths, she could hold no text-books higher than her Lord's.

It was not mere duty that drew her morn after morn, year after year, to the red-brick school-house. All the tenderness, all those eager hopes and fears which she lavished so upon her labor, meant life and love to her, for she truly loved them--those troops of laughing, heedless children, pa.s.sing like flocks of birds, stopping with her for a little twittering season to seize her bounty and, as it seemed to her, fly on gayly and forget.

It may be that I write prejudiced in her favor, but I write as one knowing the dream of a woman's lifetime to set those young feet straight in pleasant paths, to open those wondering eyes to the beauty of an ancient world about them, in every leaf of it, and wing--in the earth below and the sky above it, and there not only in the flawless azure, but in the rain-clouds' gloom.

"Dark days are also beautiful," she used to tell them. "Had you thought of that?"

They had not thought of it. It was one of those subtler things which text-books do not say; but Let.i.tia taught them, and a woman of Gra.s.sy Ford, when sore bereft, once said to me: "Dark days, doctor, are also beautiful. Miss Primrose told us that, when we went to school to her. It was of clouds she spoke, but I remembered it--and now I know."

"Oh, Miss Primrose," Johnny Murray used to say. "Do you remember when I went to school to you? Do you remember where I sat--there by the window?

Well, it's awfully funny, but do you know, I never add or multiply or subtract but I smell geraniums."

Perhaps, the Colonel would reply, that was why Johnny Murray deserted the ledgers he was set to keep--the scent of the flowers in them proved too strong for him. It may be so, for little things count so surely; it may be the reason he is today a sun-browned farmer instead of a lily-white clerk in his father's store. From the geraniums in a school-room window to a thousand peach-trees blooming in a valley is a long journey, but it was for just such journeys that Let.i.tia taught, and not merely for that shorter one which led through her petty school-room to the grade above.

Let.i.tia tells me that sitting there at her higher desk above those rows of heads, she used to think of them as flowers, and of her school-room as a garden. Often then it would come to her how pleasant a task it was to tend the roses there--golden-haired Laura Vane, and Alice Bishop, and Isabel Walton, and handsome, black-eyed Tommy Willis, whose pranks are famous in Gra.s.sy Fordshire still; then, at the doting thought of them, her heart would smite her, and she would turn to those other homelier flowers. It must have been in some such moment of repentance that Susan Leary, chancing to raise her eyes to her adored school-mistress, found Let.i.tia smiling so amiably upon her that the girl blushed, and from that hour grew more mindful of her scolding looks; her freckled face was scrubbed quite glossy after that, her dress was neater, her ribbons tied, till by-and-by, to Let.i.tia's wonder and reward, she found in that beaming Irish face upturned to her, color and fragrance for her very soul.

Young Peter Bauer was a German sprout transplanted steeragewise to a corner of the garden, and slow in budding, his face as blank as the blackboard-wall he grew beside; but one fine morning, at a single question in the B geography, it burst into roseate bloom.

"Teacher, teacher, I know dot! Suabia ist in Deutschland. Mein vater ist in Deutschland! Ich bin--"

And after that Peter was a poppy on Friday afternoons, reading essays on his fatherland. Thus, honest gardener that Let.i.tia was, she trained and pruned, disdaining nothing because of weediness, believing that what would bear a leaf would bear a flower as well. To leave at four o'clock, to return at nine and find one open which had been shut before!--is it not the gardener's morning joy?

It was not alone the plants which refused to grow for her that caused her pain. These at least she had never loved, however patiently she had cared for them. There were wayward beauties in her garden who on tenderer stalks bore longer thorns. She learned, in her way, the lesson mothers learn in theirs, who sometimes love and toil and sacrifice unceasingly, and wait, years or forever, for reward.

"Remember, Miss Primrose, you are not a mother," snapped a certain sharp-tongued matron of our town who had disagreed with her.

"Oh," said Let.i.tia, "but I have loved so many children. I am a kind of mother."

"Mother!" cried the matron.

"Yes," Let.i.tia answered. "I am a mother--without a child."

Had they been her children, it had been easier to forgive their thoughtlessness. Offended sometimes by her discipline, they said plain things of her lack of pretty youth; they whispered lies of her; she shed some tears, I know, over those scribblings which she intercepted or found forgotten on the school-room floor. Then her garden was the abode of shadows, her efforts vain there. Sometimes, for solace, she sought out Dove, but the habit of lonely thinking had grown upon her; it had been enforced by her maidenhood.

While I am not a herb-doctor by diploma, I am one by faith, simples have wrought such speedy cures in my own gray hours, and Gra.s.sy-Fordshire is so green with them that a walk by Troublesome or a climb on Sun Dial is in itself a marvellous remedy, aromatic and anodyne. In my drives to patients beyond the town, I have been seized suddenly by a kind of fever. There are no pills for it, or powders, or any drugs in all the bottles on my shelves--but a jointed fishing-rod and line kept in the bottom of a doctor's buggy is efficacious if applied in time. Often when that spell was on me I have turned Pegasus towards the nearest stream, and while he nibbled, one hour on a scented bank, fish or not--sixty drops from the gra.s.s-green phial of a summer's day--has restored my soul. Clattering home again at double-quick, Pegasus's ears on end, his nostrils quivering, my buggy thumping over thank-you-ma'ams, I would not be a city leech for a brown-stone front and a bra.s.s name-plate upon my door.

In some such pleasant hooky-hour in spring I had cast, sullenly enough, but was now humming to myself, in tune with Troublesome, when a twig snapped behind the willows. Some cow, thought I, and kept my eyes upon the stream. Another twig: I turned inquiringly. There, by the water-side, and all unmindful of my presence, was Let.i.tia Primrose.

I bit my pipe clean through. I would have called at once, but something stopped me. She stood quietly by the brook, gazing at the stones on which it played and sang. Her shoulders drooped a little, her face seemed tired and pale. She turned and saw me.

"Bertram!" Her face was guilty.

"h.e.l.lo!" I said, lighting my pipe.

"You here, Bertram?"

"Yes," I replied, casting again. "How is it you're here? No school, Let.i.tia?"

She hesitated.